ABSTRACT
If the poets and playwrights of ancient Rome equivocated in their responses to Hercules, those in the eloquent vanguard of early Christianity betrayed few such doubts. The fathers of the church inveighed against the dissolute antics of the pagan demigod, and frequently included detailed depictions of his offences against domestic order to clinch their denunciations. In his Divine Institutes Lactantius ridiculed the vanity and cowardice of a man who, unable to cope with the ulcers that disfigured his body and the diminution of his physical strength, chose to commit suicide, but not before he had soaked fields and polluted rivers with the blood of the numberless victims who had resisted his mission to ‘disturb the compact of human society’. Origen was similarly dismissive, but chose to focus on two exemplary incidents to illustrate his contempt: Hercules’ shameful subjection to Omphale, and the ostensibly parochial crime of stealing a farmer’s ox, and then devouring the whole animal while laughing at its dispossessed owner.1 But of all the patristics it was Tertullian who focused his scorn for Hercules most directly on the disruption of domestic space, and he did so by imaginatively reconstructing the hero’s transgressions as if they had taken place in the mistress’s bedrooms so feverishly described by the Roman elegists. Tertullian figured the legendary Herculean club smeared not with the gore of his adversaries but with unguents, lingering traces of blood from the Hydra or Nessus scrubbed away with a pumice stone, and the hero – ensconced in a chamber that Omphale has, Tertullian hopes, perfumed with balsam and fenugreek – busying himself with hairpins and adapting his arrows to a new purpose, the sewing of coronets.2
